[Python-Dev] OS X Installer for 3.0.1 and supported versions (original) (raw)

"Martin v. Löwis" martin at v.loewis.de
Sat Feb 14 20:15:25 CET 2009

Ronald Oussoren wrote:

On 14 Feb, 2009, at 19:04, Martin v. Löwis wrote:

A single installer could support both 32-bit on 10.4 and 64-bit on 10.5, but I don't think that's very useful because there are changes in the low-level unix API's that could result in different behaviour of a 32-bit and 64-bit script on the same system. In general 10.5 has much saner Unix API's than earlier releases. I don't get that. Why would the scripts behave differently on 10.5 depending on whether the Python interpreter is 32-bit or 64-bit? Surely, the Unix API does the same thing, whether invoked from 32-bit code, or 64-bit code, no? I should have been more clear: the unix API for code that runs on 10.4 is slightly different than that for code that runs on 10.5+, Apple basiclly fixed a number of UNIX API-compliance issues in 10.5.

So how come? Are you really saying that 10.5 somehow knows whether the code might also run on 10.4, and if so, deliberately behaves differently?

So that a Python interpreter compiled for 10.4+ would behave differently on a specific 10.5 installation than a Python interpreter compiled for 10.5+, on the very same system?

If so, I'm -1 on providing two sets of binaries for the same Python version (one in 10.4+ mode and one in 10.5+ mode). Otherwise, this sounds like a good source of confusion: "are you using Python 3.1 as compiled for 10.4 or 3.1 as compiled for 10.5?" - "well, how do I tell?"

Is this Apple's DLL hell?

Regards, Martin

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list